Bienvenidos! (Pt. 1)

Seeing how I have to go do some more orientation things, I'll post what I have as of now and finish the rest of the past two days when I return later tonight, in order to keep both Fran entertained and delay my mother's inevitable heart-attack.

Ok so with the combination of orientation things and jet-lag, it’s taken me a few days to actually get to writing this. Mainly because I’ve been using the siesta time these past few days to, well, siesta.  So why don’t we recap the past couple of days:

Waiting in the airport was a blast. I don’t think I’ve ever made it through everything as quickly as I did, which I guess is a good thing since the last time I was in an airport we were scrambling to get through customs and to our plane and some of us barely just made it. But anyway, getting there that early inevitably meant I was going to be starving way before I ever even got onto the plane. And seeing how everything in the airport is marked up 500%, I wasn’t too thrilled about this. So of course in order to keep my mind off the possibility of cracking before I get on the plane to go and get food, what else is there for people bored out of their mind in sitting in a large communal area to do other than people watch? Of course as I’m sitting there though, someone decides to apparently buy wings (or something that smelt like them) and sat down in the terminal. Way to go jerk, if you’re going to bring something that can diffuse throughout the air as easily as hot wings and remind some of us (me) that we’re (I) am hungry, I sure do hope you have brought enough for everyone. Aside from the load of foreigners running about the airport looking like their heads are chopped off, here’s a brief list of the more prominent characters that I had the pleasure of watching walk about the airport: Overweight policeman riding on a segway (but is he riding the segway because he’s clearly overweight and wouldn’t be able to make in down a complete terminal without going into cardiac arrest, or has his love for this two-wheeled futuristic magical scooter device ultimately cut out any and all exercise this man has ever done, this accelerating the deceleration of his metabolism?);  little kid with a lightsaber running by (it was one of those glass neon ones – and seriously, those things can cause some serious damage if broken properly, you’re telling me I can’t bring on more than 3 oz of toothpaste onto the plane, but you can get through with THAT? Come on now people.); and then there was the man who walked by blatantly sticking his chest out, and I’m not saying a small little chest puff, but more like if this guy had his chest out any farther, he’d be bent over backwards with his head between his legs. By now I’m sure you’re wondering, “Wait!? What about the hunger situation!?” Well now, with about an hour before the plane ride, I inevitably cracked, and went off to venture to find something to eat. As such, I think I spent about three weeks worth of traveling money on a collection of things worth about $10. Woohoo.

The flight itself could have been worse, could have been better. I swear the seats get smaller every time I fly somewhere. When we finally landed in Madrid we got to wait around for 2 ½ hours for the IES people to get there. This was after of course I exchanged $45 American dollars for about 27 Euro. Screw you economy. The bus ride from Madrid to Salamanca was about 2.5 hours, 2 of which I pretty much passed out for.  Whoops.

Upon arriving in Salamanca we met our host families. So let me quickly set up this scene: I haven’t spoken or listened to any Spanish in three months, we’ve been traveling for what seemed like forever and a 6 hour jump ahead in time makes for extreme jet-lag, and I’m pretty sure my body was screaming “WTF” at the fact that technically it was like 4 in the morning back home but the sun was up and shining ever so brightly which led for a bit of a headache. Needless to say, I was not in the best of conditions for fully understanding anything that was really going on. But anyway, me and my housemate met our Señora and headed home. So aside from the things just mentioned, what probably made it even more difficult to process what was going on was the thick Castilian accent that my host mom has, which I am nowhere used to. This translates to me catching maybe every third of fourth word she was saying and trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together.  After some repeating and talking with my housemate, we realized that she was actually letting us pick whichever room we wanted to stay in. She had three, two with one bed and one with two. The two beds in the one room were slightly bigger than the other singles so after attempting to lie down on the one bed in the single room and just barely fitting, I decided to go with the room with the two beds. We had our Cena (which in Spain is the biggest meal of the day, usually eaten around 2:00) after dropping our things off in the room and then both proceeded to take a much needed nap.

tbc.